After finishing The Tudors miniseries, I eagerly dove into The Kennedys, as one of my good friends had recommended it. I had worried that it would a little too political for me to follow, as my friend is a political science major and I have no interest in politics whatsoever, but my worries turned out to be needless (as they usually are).
Featuring Greg Kinnear as JFK and Katie Holmes as Jackie, this miniseries contained enough of an emphasis on their home and family life, not to mention the history and ancestry of their father, Joe Kennedy, to keep me interested. Not to mention the right amount of drama–not too much, but not too little either.
As an average American, I did not know much about the Kennedys when I began watching this series–I didn’t even know how many siblings JFK had. (Turns out, quite a few.) But even someone with more knowledge than me would have learned quite a few things.
I titled this post, ‘The undoing of a family’ because Joe Kennedy immigrated to the United States and built his family out of nothing. He rose to political importance and pushed his sons to do the same. His sons actually had little choice in what they wanted to do with their lives, especially after the oldest son, Joe Jr., died in World War II. Their father had planned for Joe Jr. to run for president, but after his death, that task fell to Jack, with Bobby running the campaign.
The miniseries begins with Joe’s death and ends with Bobby’s death. It details Joe Sr.’s stroke, the death of three of his children and the commitment of one other to a mental institution.
Joe Sr. sacrificed many things in his struggle for political power, the death of Joe, Jack and Bobby being only the beginning. He lost the love of his wife, the trust of his children, and the meaning of being a family. In other words, he lost the most important and valuable things a person can have in this world.
The miniseries also details Jack’s many infidelities and the struggle Jackie went through to stay loyal to him. After being witness to Jack’s constant failures as a husband, one remains thankful to him for the great matters he dealt with as president, but becomes ashamed of the man he was.
The Kennedys, although dramatized for television, provides a truthful, accurate and easily followable story of a family who, founded on poverty and built on power, falls from grace because of the very thing on which it was built.
Kinnear and Holmes both did an excellent job portraying their roles, especially Holmes. Some reviews scorned her accent, and although it was a bit overdone with a few words, overall it was very good. They were both so believable that by the end, one had forgotten that they were simply actors.